Friday, July 17, 2015

The dermatofibrosarcoma of Darier Ferrand is one of the
million and one goombas that seem to lurk about in the world, just waiting to fuck
with us. According to one french entry about it, the sarcoma evolves “indolently”.
That was certainly true about mine. In return, my response to the thing evolved
indolently too, until last year I finally saw a dermatologist in Santa Monica
and had him do a biopsy of this welt like thing on my thigh. The biopsy came
back with the conclusion that the lab hadn’t had enough material to make a
definitive identification. Two weeks ago, I went to a French doctor who,
without much ado, took a much bigger chunk of my thigh and sent it to the
laboratory, where they ID’ed it. And so it was that I was advised by a surgeon
that it was the kind of thing which, though benign, would produce troubles for
me later on. His advise was to take it out.

Yesterday morning, A. and I advanced to the Clinique St.
Jean, which is just around the corner here in Montpellier. I promised that I
hadn’t eaten or drunk anything the previous night or morning. I showered in
this chemical substance that I think was designed to kill my lice, if I had
them, and that apparently rendered me medically neutral as far as germs go. And
then I was off, which meant the dreams of my childhood were fullfilled and I
was wheeled on a gurney through the halls of a hospital. And then I went under
general anaesthesia.

General anaesthesia my be the most disturbing thing I have
ever undergone. There was little ceremony. First, I was hooked up to a drip,
and then the triangular shaped plastic bit was fitted over my mouth and nose
and I smelled anti-life. Whatever it is that composes that anaesthetic, the
smell went through me like death. In fact, it is surely one of the smells of
death. I don’t have a group on my tongue that corresponds to its taste. It was the taste of Anti-Roger.

Then it was two hours later and I was waked up. I was in a
room with a bunch of other patients and some jolly doctors and nurses. The
personnel at Clinique St. Jean are invariably nice and sweet. The hospital
services a lot of children, and perhaps that is one of the reasons. In comparison,
American hospitals are pits of doom. But at the time I woke up, the jolliness
was viscerally revolting. I was asked if ca va, and I answered oui, but all the
while I was having the wierdest reaction, a sort of full body panic. I felt
somehow that I’d been turned wrong in my skin. In fact, the divot taken out of
my thigh and the skin grafts taken out of my lower stomach didn’t even
register, at that moment. Now they do, of course, and I’m enjoying the idea
that I can now describe, with some authenticity, the feeling of being shot in
some future novel – or maybe the novel I am writing now. But the full body
panic was very different. I could barely stand the room, and then, fortunately,
it was decided to wheel me elsewhere. The childish pleasure of being pushed on
the gurney was, to say the least, attenuated. Finally, though, I saw A.

There have been countless times in the past when A. has
saved my sanity. This was one of those times, a big one. I felt finally that I
was anchored, that the panic would pass, that I’d be out of here, and that I
would do this and we’d be all right.

Now I sit here with my two cannes anglaises next to me,
wondering how it was I thought this was going to be easy. Of course, that’s my narcissism.
Soon enough, the skin grafts will attach themselves and I’ll be a new man, sans
goomba. At the moment, though, I am definitely on Jimmy Stewart’s frequency in
Rear Window. Save for the fact that I have no neighbors to peer at in this heat
wave.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

I’ve been extremely and disgustingly idle this vacation. I
blame the heat. I blame old age, the slowing down of my cerebral processes, and
George W. Bush – because anything bad that happens in the world has to be
blamed on George W. Bush. That’s my philosophy and I’m stickin’ with it.

However, my brain ain’t so slow that I’m going to take “idleness”
as a self-evident description.

It strikes me, at least, that this idleness is connected
with simultaneity, the temporal mode that characterizes modernity. Simultaneity
is of industrial manufacture – it was produced as an effect of the steam driven
printing press, the railroad, and the system of manufacture that came about in
the nineteenth century, which has resulted in the fact that you can get strawberries
all the year round in your local grocery store and that you can, if you want,
breathlessly follow the crisis in Greece on computer and tv screens in ‘real
time”.

Idleness is falling out of the zone of the simultaneousness.
Well, up to a point. I don’t breathlessly follow the news – I don’t even summon
the usual indignation when reading about the plutocrats and crooks that lead the
Western world, among others, and lead it badly while picking its pocket. And I
tend to not miss the strawberries, instead indulging in the fruits of summer
where I can find them at the corner marche. This, admittedly, is easier to do
in Montpellier France, where I am writing this, than in Los Angeles,
California.

Outside of the zone of the simultaneous, to which all our
tasks and habits seem to attach themselves, I have to move forward in a
dreamier space-time, the older, slower modes of past, present and future. Now,
this should be ideal for writing a chapter in a novel – the chapter in my novel
that I have been working on for the past three weeks – since after all, when we
are idle, we reach for novels. Summer reading is, for many people, the only
reading they ever do – that is, of the novelistic kind. Magazines of a certain
type, too, tend to pile up on the picnic table – Paris Match, Vanity Fair,
Elle, Healthy Living – as if now is the time to plunge into them. Of course,
this isn’t entirely removed from the simultaneous world, as we often speaking
of “catching up” with our reading – and “catching up” is the central imperative
of the world of simultaneity, the glue that keeps it together.

The paradox is that I want my novel, I want my chapter, I
want my characters to be fully charged with the “catching up” imperative, and
even become something to be published and caught up with. Fond hope!

Which is where my idleness has hit me broadsides. I can’t be
bothered to catch up. And he who is not
busy catching up is surely not busy at all, and can only be tolerated in small
increments.

In other words: all vacations have to end, my situationist
friends. Sorry about that.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.